Trainer Dark Souls 2 Scholar Of The First Sin

[Telly Piatt]

WalterScott, in his schoolmasters, has caricatured pedantry; so hasShakespeare. But Dickens has discovered a variety of types of pedantry andmade them all easily recognisable and odious to us. More than this, he hasattacked the evil of cramming, the evil of isolation from the family inthe boarding school for too young children, and the evil of uninterestinginstruction. Whatever is good and reasonable for the child to know shouldbe made interesting to the child, and the teacher is to be consideredincompetent who can not find in the life histories of his class threads ofdaily experience and present interest to which he can attach every pointthat the regular lesson contains.

Above all, Dickens has introduced a reform as to the habit of terrorizingchildren. Corporal punishment has diminished to one fourth of its formeramount, and Charles Dickens is the prophet to whom the reform owes itspotency. In fact, the habit of finding in the good tendencies of the childthe levers with which to move him to the repression of his bad impulseshas placed in the hands of the professional teacher the means of governingthe child without appeal to force except in the rarest cases.

The tendency to caricature an evil has its dangers, of course, andDickens, like all the other educational reformers, has often condemned asentirely unworthy of toleration what has really in it some good reason forits existence. It was the abuse that needed correction. Reform instead ofrevolution should have been recommended, but the reformer often gets soheated in his contest with superficial evil that he attacks what isfundamentally good. He cuts down the tree when it needed only the removalof a twig infested with caterpillars. This defect of the reformer rendersnecessary a new reformer, and thus arises a pendulum swing of educationalmethod from one extreme to another.

Dickens shares with all reformers some of their weaknesses, but he doesnot share his most excellent qualities with many of them. He stands apartand alone as one of the most potent influences of social reform in the[Pg viii]nineteenth century, and therefore deserves to be read and studied by allwho have to do with schools and by all parents everywhere in our day andgeneration.

Dickens was the most profound exponent of the kindergarten and the mostcomprehensive student of childhood that England has yet produced. He wasone of the first great advocates of a national system of schools, and hisrevelations of the ignorance and the intellectual and spiritualdestitution of the children of the poor led to the deep interest whichultimately brought about the establishment of free schools in England.

He was essentially a child trainer rather than a teacher. In thetwenty-eight schools described in his writings, and in the training of hisarmy of little children in institutions and homes, he reveals nearly everyform of bad training resulting from ignorance, selfishness, indifference,unwise zeal, unphilosophic philosophy, and un-Christian theology. No otherwriter has attacked so many phases of wrong training, unjust treatment,and ill usage of childhood.

But Dickens studied the methods of cultivating the minds of children, aswell as their character development. He exposed the evils of cramming morevigorously than any other writer. He taught the essential character of theimagination in intellectual and spiritual development. He showed the needof correlation of studies, and of apperceptive centres of feeling andthought in order to comprehend, and assimilate, and transform intodefinite power the knowledge and thought that is brought to our minds.

It is said by some, who see but the surface of the work of Dickens, thathis work is done. Much of the good work for which he lived has been done,but much more remains to be done. Men are but beginning the work of childstudy and of rational education. The twentieth century will understandDickens better than the nineteenth has understood him. His profoundphilosophy is only partially comprehended yet, even by the leaders ineducational work. Teachers and all students of childhood will find in histrue feeling and rich thought revelation and inspiration.

The highest form of teaching is the informal, the indirect, theincidental. The fact that his educational principles are revealed chieflyby the evolution of the characters in his novels and stories, instead ofby the direct philosophic statements of scientific pedagogy or psychology,gives Dickens higher rank as an educator, not only because it gives himmuch wider influence, but because it makes his teaching more effective byarousing deep, strong feeling to give permanency and propulsive force tohis great thoughts.

Was Dickens consciously and intentionally an educator? The prefaces to hisnovels; the preface to his Household Words; the educational articles hewrote; the prominence given in his books to child training in homes,institutions, and schools; the statements of the highest educationalphilosophy found in his writings; and especially the clearness of hisinsight and the profoundness of his educational thought, as shown by hiscondemnation of the wrong and his appreciation of the right in teachingand training the child, prove beyond question that he was[Pg 2] not only broadand true in his sympathy with childhood, but that he was a careful andprogressive student of the fundamental principles of education.

Dickens was the first great English student of the kindergarten. Hisarticle on Infant Gardens, published in Household Words in 1855, is one ofthe most comprehensive articles ever written on the kindergartenphilosophy. It shows a perfect appreciation of the physical, intellectual,and spiritual aims of Froebel, and a clear recognition of the value ofright early training and of the influence of free self-activity in thedevelopment of individual power and character.

Dickens is beyond comparison the chief English apostle of childhood, andits leading champion in securing a just, intelligent, and consideraterecognition of its rights by adulthood, which till his time had beendeliberately coercive and almost universally tyrannical in dealing withchildren. He entered more fully than any other English author intosympathy with childhood from the standpoint of the child. Other educatorsand philanthropists have shown consideration for children, but Dickens hadthe perfect sympathy with childhood that sees and feels with the child,not merely for him.

Dickens attacked all forms of coercion in child training. He discussedfourteen types of coercion, from the brutal corporal punishment of Squeersand Creakle in schools, of Bumble and the Christian philanthropist withthe white waistcoat in institutions, and of the Murdstones and Mrs.Gargery in homes, to the gentle but dwarfing firmness of the dominant willof placid Mrs. Crisparkle. He condemned all coercion because it preventsthe full development of selfhood, and makes men negative instead ofpositive.

Among the many improvements made in child training none is more completethan the change in discipline. For this change the world is indebtedchiefly to Froebel and Dickens. Froebel revealed the true philosophy,Dickens gave it wings; Froebel gave the thought, Dickens made the thoughtclear and strong by arousing energetic feeling in harmony with it.

Dickens helped to break the bonds of the doctrine of child depravity. Thisdoctrine had a most depressing influence on educators. It was not possibleto reverence a child so long as he was regarded as a totally depravedthing. Froebel and Dickens did not teach that a child is totally divine,but they did believe that every child possesses certain elements ofdivinity which constitute selfhood or individuality, and that if thisselfhood is developed in conscious unity with the Divine Fatherhood thechild will attain to complete manhood. This thought gives the educator anew and a higher attitude toward childhood. The child is no longer a thingto be repressed, but a being to be developed. Men are not persistentlydwarfed now by deliberate efforts to define a blighting consciousness ofweakness; they are stimulated to broader effort and higher purpose by atrue self-consciousness of individual power. The philosophy that trainsmen to recognise responsibility for the good in their nature is infinitelymore productive educationally than that which teaches men responsibilityfor the evil in their nature.

She had heard of the kindergarten and had caught some of its spirit ofsympathy with the child, but she did not understand its methods. JemmyLirriper received perfectly sympathetic treatment from Mrs. Lirriper andthe Major; Agnes loved her little scholars; Esther, who sympathized witheverybody, loved her pupils, and was beloved by them; and the Bachelor,who introduced Mr. Marton to his second school, was a genuine boy in hiscomprehensive sympathy with real, boyish boyhood.

So throughout all his books Dickens pleads for kindly treatment for thechild, and for complete sympathy with him in his childish feelings andinterests. He gave the child the place of honour in literature for thefirst time, and he aroused the heart of the Christian world to the factthat it was treating the child in a very un-Christlike way. He pleaded fora better education for the child, for a free childhood, for greaterliberty in the home and in the school, for fuller sympathy especially atthe time when childhood merges into youth and when the mysteries of lifehave begun to make themselves conscious to the young mind and heart. Thepoorer the child the greater the need he revealed.

The wisdom of studying the subject of nutrition as[Pg 7] one of the mostimportant subjects connected with the development of children physically,intellectually, and morally, and the meanness or carelessness toofrequently shown in feeding children, were taught in Oliver Twist, OldCuriosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield,Bleak House, Great Expectations, Edwin Drood, Christmas Stories, andAmerican Notes.

The need of practising the fundamental law of co-operation and the sharingof responsibilities and duties, as the foundation for the truecomprehension of the law of community, is shown in Barnaby Rudge, DavidCopperfield, Dombey and Son, and Little Dorrit.

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